Decatur

by Patricia Lynch

  “Get in,” Max said motioning to the car, “We’ll go together.”

  “What about the taxi?” asked Sister Petra.

  “Things happen. He’ll get over it,” Max replied, feeling a nauseous pang in his stomach. Father Troy attacked and robbed, who else could it be but Gar?

  “I know who you are,” Marilyn whispered to Sister Petra as the nun climbed in the back seat.

  “I’m sorry, I was very young,” Sister Petra said gravely as Rowley looked at her over the front seat with Max pulling out of the drive. The woman in black in the back was giving off an embarrassed heat, he noticed.

  “It was a long time ago,” Marilyn said, remembering the copper fount bubbling and how that just seemed another sign of the mysterious journey that she fully entered in the year she was nine. But now she was too worried about Father Troy to let old memories suck her down and away.

  Gar found the doctor’s office on West Main easily; he must have ridden past it a number of times while biking around town doing errands for the parish. There was a sign that said “Be back soon” with a little paper clock with the red cardboard hands at 1:30 on the door. Gar stood on the cement porch of the brick one-story thinking and then he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist, punched the glass window on the door and, reaching in, turned the inside knob unlocking the door. The waiting room was dim with the blinds closed, a sickly looking plant, a couple of chairs, and a table with magazines. He walked past the nurse receptionist desk and went down the linoleum hallway, pushing a blond wood door open to an examination room, empty with a white paper-covered vinyl-padded reclining chair the color of blood waiting for the next patient, and an eye exam chart hung on the wall. In the back of the building was the doctor’s consultation room with a skeleton hanging from a rod, bookcases of medical books including a thick Merck’s manual, and some baskets of sample ointments and pills from pharmaceutical companies. Gar heard a toilet flush and smiled. The narrow bathroom door opened and Doctor Smythe came heavily into the room in his rumpled white coat with his mustache trailing down to the first of his double chins.

  “Val? Back already from Steak and Shake?” Peter Smythe said, looking up and seeing a large muscular bare-chested man with an unfortunate facial cut and slice of lip hanging by a few tissue threads. “I don’t have any drugs,” Smythe said in a high voice, quickly backing away behind his desk and pulling the middle drawer open where he kept his revolver.

  “Don’t know that I’ll need any. And if you pull a gun out I’ll be forced to kill you before you get the first shot off, good Doc. Which I really don’t want to do. I’m a friend of your fellow queer Father Troy and he sent me here with a sweet little note,” said Gar, pulling the note from his pocket along with a couple of fifty dollar bills which he threw on the desk.

  Dr, Smythe didn’t try to pull the gun out; the look in the intruder’s eyes was enough to freeze him in his tracks. He picked up the money and then the note, which read, “Do this for me, in remembrance, Father Troy.” He saw in his mind’s eye the blue tiled men’s room at St. Mary’s and remembered the feel of the priest.

  “What do you want?” asked Dr. Smythe with a note of resignation in his voice. Being queer meant you constantly were getting into scrapes, or worse, trying to find some way to fulfill the desires that made others sick but seemed perfectly natural to you. Peter Smythe had seen his share of trouble.

  “I need you to sew me up,” Gar touched his lip. “And do it good.”

  The doctor nodded, “Okay,” he said and then looked at his watch; his nurse Val was due back any minute. Gar nodded sagely like he could guess what he was thinking.

  “It’s Val? Your nurse I bet. Tell her you had an accident and send her home. She can call your appointments tomorrow and make your apologies but I need my privacy. You understand. Oh, and good doc, your front door’s a little smashed in. Sorry.”

  Peter Smythe walked the big man into his exam room, weighing his options. If he had Val call the police there might be a search of the office and he kept a large collection of gay porn in his desk along with his gun, which they shouldn’t get into but what if they did? “Sit here,” he said indicating the reclining patient chair. He pulled out a septic stick from the cabinet and rubbed it on the man’s lip. He didn’t even flinch: tough bastard, but he did have an animal-like charm. Pull it together, Peter, this man is dangerous, he warned himself as he looked into the stranger’s gold-flecked eyes. Eye of the tiger, he thought. “Wait while I get her to go,” he said.

  “Fine, do anything funny, and you’ll both be in the obit section of the Herald, Doc, just so you know.”

  Valerie Cunningham saw Dr. Smythe with a broom in his hand sweeping off the front porch when she came back with his vanilla shake and double cheeseburger from Steak and Shake. He took the sack and bit his puffy lower lip draped by his walrus mustache. “Val, I felt faint and fell against the door here. We’ll have to get that fixed,” he smiled in apology for the mess. “Shouldn’t have waited so long to eat. I guess my blood sugar’s down. I’m gonna close the office, you go on home. We’ll call whoever we miss today back in tomorrow.”

  “But,” Valerie started to protest.

  “Do as I say,” Dr. Smythe said, “Scoot.”

  The doctor carefully threaded the needle. He noticed that the man had a mean looking bite that was starting to scab over on his neck. He felt it with his fingers and the man didn’t move a muscle. “I’m guessing you’re not going to tell me what happened so I won’t ask,” Dr. Smythe said as he began to carefully stitch the piece of the lip back on. It didn’t take long. He held up a mirror for the intruder who looked at the work with an appraising eye. The stitches were tiny. Good. Gar picked up the shake cup with the straw sticking out the top and took a slurp. Vanilla. Okay. He dug around in the white sack and ripped the cheeseburger in two, handing a piece to the heavy-set older man who was looking at him with a mixture of fear and fascination. Gar bit down on the now cold cheeseburger thoughtfully.

  “I’m not real hungry now, Doc. I ate earlier,” he said with a wolfish grin, “But I’m gonna need a nap. It’ll help me cure. You come back tomorrow and I’ll be gone. Promise.”

  Peter Smythe agreed, just asking to get his medical bag. Gar nodded and lay back on the chair. This wasn’t bad at all. The doctor grabbed his bag and hot footed it out of the office, glad to be alive.

  Father Weston had commandeered the family conference room adjacent to St. Mary’s Chapel. It looked out over the sleek small chapel with its beautiful stained glass contemporary Madonna made of blocks of different shades of blue. Marilyn and Max had joined them at the hospital along with Rowley, which took some persuading of the front desk, but here Agent Tooley came in handy; flashing his badge, he waived the security guards off with a “Dog’s trained. FBI business.” They hadn’t told anyone yet the whole truth about what happened in Fairview Cemetery with Gar, only that he had pursued Marilyn, and Rowley had helped them escape. Agent Tooley was now out in the hospital lobby debriefing the local cops. Sister Petra had been dispatched to man the Monsignor’s visitation throughout the day, as they gathered their forces together at the hospital and pieced together what they knew. Max looked around the table, eyeing their collective human and canine resources, long on intelligence and loyalty, but they made an odd against-the-grain collection. Mixed breed dog, waitress, disgraced professor and a sometimes hard-drinking priest; it didn’t seem like enough.

  Father Troy was still in the emergency room and they were waiting for news on his condition, but frankly no-one was holding out much hope for what modern medicine could do against the work of a soul hunter. Father Weston had told them what had happened in the attack on Father Troy in the morgue, even gently alluding to the Monsignor’s ghost. Then Marilyn told them how Gar had assaulted her and Rowley in the ruined mausoleum and how they had managed to escape. Rowley put his head in Marilyn’s lap as she told their story, knowing he would do it all over again in an instant. Father W’s eyes wi
dened at how Marilyn had willed the saber to fall off the crypt wall and slice Gar, recognizing that this was an entirely new development. Then Max wrapped it all up like he might have done a doctoral thesis in earlier days, reminding them what Marilyn’s earlier past life regressions as the young monk in Siam and the Shaker sister in Hancock had taught them, the research he and Gretch Wendell had been able to do on soul hunters, Gar’s bloody trail of murders in pursuit of the source, and then finally the karmic collision that had occurred when a sixteenth-century warrior named Alligherio met the desperate novice Isabella in the convent of Our Lady of Consolation at the crafty behest of a hermit in a section he simply called ‘Isabella Speaks’. Max found himself trying to piece together what they knew about the hermit, the novice and the warrior. “So Gar has found Marilyn’s being three times but what I want to understand, and I think I’m gonna need Gretch’s help here, is what happened to the hermit?” No-one answered and there was a long uneasy silence as everyone thought over what that meant until Father Weston finally spoke.

  “I think everyone knows that we can’t talk about this outside this room. We’re going to have lot of interaction with various authorities and we want to find a way to work with them, not against them.” Father W warned. The group nodded.

  “Gar’s a psychopath given to fantasies about souls and immortality, that’s the professional opinion I’m giving to the authorities. In the meantime I’ve got us a six thirty appointment with Gretch Wendell. We’re to meet her at some place called the Sunflower Café. It’s next to the university’s library,” Max said.

  “Just don’t forget that we’re going to need some folks who color inside the lines as well, Max. Theories are great but we need protection and arrest warrants,” said Father Weston, his eyes resting on the stained glass window of Mary. His faith in the power of good was severely shaken by the day’s events and he wondered again if he had enough inner strength to hold fast to his beliefs in the turbulent currents they were facing.

  The frazzled ER doctor, Sam Reed, came in then. Reed had chosen Emergency Medicine as a new specialty in med school and most days loved the adrenaline rush of triaging patients, performing high-risk tracheotomies, and even operating on the occasional gun shot victim. He blinked and suppressed the desire to rub his eyes as he looked over the assembled group waiting for Father Troy’s prognosis. A casual Catholic, Sam had always liked the young priest, who would roam around the hospital in sandals carrying a guitar. Not that he had much contact - Sam saw patients at the front end of the conveyer belt; when they made it past him they were carried to the upper floors of the hospital where they would rest and recuperate, and things like singing priests and balloon bouquets appeared or they didn’t. Now he had to tell Father Weston and his odd friends (and just who had let a dog in, Sam wondered, but he was already too disturbed to make a fuss) that whatever afflicted Father Troy was beyond his abilities to help. The priest had suffered some sort of rapid mental deterioration and sustained hysteria following the assault and robbery by the tramp at the funeral home. He had screamed repeatedly that he should be taken home or to the Bishop but had let a stream of profanities out when Father Weston was mentioned. Desperate, Sam had the head nurse call Springfield to see what the Bishop Quincy wanted him to do with the priest. It was clear he wasn’t going to go with Father Weston. It was all too depressing and Sam had found himself washing his hands obsessively in the scrub room after he had sedated Troy. He had to get him out of the ER now because beds were scarce and, while there was something deeply wrong, it wasn’t going to be cured there.

  “The Bishop and an aide are due here before eight tonight. He had to change his schedule and I understand he’ll be coming again tomorrow to say the Monsignor’s mass but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry this is all happening at once, Father Weston. I truly am. I think Father Troy should be put on East Wing of Floor Five at least for the rest of the week,” Sam said to Father W, whose face was ashen but resolute. “He won’t commit himself and I don’t have the authority based on what I know to do anything else but to put him under twenty-four hour observation until and unless the Bishop agrees with me. I’ve never quite seen anything like this and he’s going to need psychiatric care.”

  The East Wing of Floor Five was the locked ward. It would mean Father Troy would have to be involuntarily committed. Only the Bishop could commit him now that the Monsignor was dead, Father Weston realized with a sick feeling.

  Max saw the coming years of locked wards and therapy that would never address the root problem ahead for Father Troy. Marilyn bit her knuckle knowing how just a tiny thread of her soul sucked away into Gar’s emptiness felt, and pulled Rowley closer to her. This was awful. Rowley’s heart went out to the humans in the room; they were all bending under the weight of the man called Gar’s murderous intentions. Get the fang and blood instinct going in your muscles, bones, and teeth, he thought. We’re gonna need it. Max got up then, “Fine. We’re going to meet with an expert over at University of Illinois who may have some additional insights on Father Troy’s condition. It’s possible that Gar has preyed on Father Troy’s imagination in such a way that he has begun to believe that Gar has some kind of supernatural powers and it’s contributing to his hysteria,” Max said.

  Dr. Reed shrugged. “If you think the Bishop wants another opinion, get one.” He just wanted to get the priest off his hands. He liked the quick knife, the surgical incision, the neat stitch, the clean tightly bandaged wound, and just none of these applied. “I’ll work on the papers for the Bishop; in the meantime we’ve sedated the father and put him in a transfer room under observation.”

  Father Weston looked around the room. “Since Dr. Wendell can see us, we should take advantage of her advice.” He doubted that the Bishop would listen but he had to try and the head of the Institute of Conscious Studies and Ancient Religions’ advice on how to treat an ordained priest suffering a severe ailment of the soul might be the best they’d get.

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  Consultations

  The sun was threatening to just slink away and the leaden sky was a greenish grey as they found their way onto Oak Street, the main drag before the sprawling Fighting Illini campus. It had a traditional large green quad and federalist style brick buildings now dwarfed by hi-rises and hulking cement fortresses all around the older inner ring. The ride over had been quiet with everyone trying to recover from the day but now they were impatient to find Gretch. After a couple of wrong turns in the prairie town completely swamped by the University, they saw the faded wooden building with a large low western-style front porch with the name in yellow script, “Sunflower Café”. Father Weston pulled his navy blue olds up to the front of the building, took one look and said, “This is your idea of a neutral place?”

  The front porch was a jumble of furniture, old dinette sets, a red velour-covered couch, fraying wicker chairs and upended wooden fruit crates with fading labels proclaiming “Golden Girl Peaches” and the like. A big milk can was filled with lilac blossoms and a chalk board announced the specials; most of them came with sprouts and avocado. The beer was Rolling Rock and Hamms and the wine, Blue Nun. The clientele was pure hippie. Max opened the back door of the sedan, got out, and breathed deeply. He missed places like this. It smelled extravagantly of fresh garlicky salsa, compost, patchouli oil and, yes, grass.

  Marilyn got out then with Rowley. “I don’t think they’ll mind,” she said. There was a large tabby underneath the porch and a big fur ball of an English sheep dog sleeping on a sagging easy chair by the front door. “He’s well-behaved.”

  “I just thank God the bishop isn’t here.” Father Weston muttered as he walked up the steps to the Sunflower Café, Champaign Urbana’s hippie heaven.

  “Don’t we all,” Max said and strode up to the front porch where a guy with blond hair in tight corkscrew curls was picking out a tune on a mandolin. Something about the haunting music and the sweet faced kid lifted their grim spirits and Marilyn fis
hed out a buck, dropping it in the open cigar box at his feet.

  A long lanky student with a red bandana around his head and intense eyes jerked his head and pointed to the rear of the café. “She’s in the booth in the back,” like he had been told to expect them. The place was full of plants hanging in macramé holders and free newspapers and posters announcing anti-government rallies, yoga classes, and socialist marching band practice. All the furniture including counters and booths looked to be scrounged from other places and the kids at the tables looked up from their guacamole and chips or veggie burgers with skin-on fries to glance curiously at a priest and uniformed waitress in their place, but their eyes ran right over Max, he was just another professor and they came here regularly enough.

  Gretch Wendell was in a sprawling red vinyl semi-circular booth with a female graduate student with long brown hair in a braid who was wearing combat pants and work boots. There was a metal ash-tray and couple of beer bottles on the table along with what looked to be like the remains of black bean nachos. Gretch leaned over and whispered in the young woman’s ear as Max, Marilyn and Father Weston approached. The student gave everyone a critical once over, got up, scooping books and papers into her green canvas knapsack, and said, “See you at the seminar, Gretch. Thanks for the beer.” She then sauntered past their little group like they didn’t exist and out of the café.

  “Don’t mind Lee, she has an awful crush on me,” Gretch said with a twinkle in her eye. She looked younger here in the fading afternoon light coming through the big old windows of the student hangout. She was wearing a man’s shirt and big leather belt around a surprising slim waist and with her polio leg tucked out of sight it was easy to imagine her at some ancient world dig site directing a swarm of workers. “Sit down and tell me everything.” The student with the red bandana came over as they settled themselves but Gretch waved the plastic covered menus away. “They need salt and fat, Rich. Bring a couple of orders of French-fries with plenty of sour cream and ketchup on the side. And four cokes.”